I made burgers using 4 different appliances, and even my grill-master husband preferred the air fryer

At the grocery store, I picked up ground beef, hamburger buns, and American cheese — my son's favorite burger topping.

I prefer handmade patties to frozen options, so I went to work making one patty for each member of my family. Our preference is to use an 80-to-20 blend of ground beef to keep some fattiness in the meat.

I really like a steakhouse-burger recipe I found that uses a panade — a mixture of bread and milk — along with ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, minced garlic, salt, and pepper.

After scanning internet search results for the best way to cook a burger in the oven, I decided on 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes.

I placed a cooking rack on top of a cookie sheet and put the burger patty on the rack.

My cooking time was perfect, but the drippings from the burger were a pain to clean off the cookie sheet and rack afterward.

I found the texture of the oven patty to be more similar to meatloaf than normal burgers, but it was my daughter's favorite.

This was the first time any of my family members had eaten a burger prepared this way, and there was definitely a tenderness to the meat. It seemed to melt in your mouth without the crunchy outside texture a grill or stove sometimes provides.

Frying anything in a pan comes with popping grease and a bit of a mess, and cooking a burger over the stove was no exception.

Following a few online recipes, I added a bit of oil to the pan and cooked the burger for about four minutes per side — eight minutes total. My goal was to end up with a medium doneness. 

This was probably the second-messiest cooking method since it required both washing the pan and wiping down the surface of the stove afterward.

The stove provided the perfect amount of caramelization on the outside of the patty. The crispy exterior was flavorful and delicious, and I found myself going back for more bites of this burger than any other. 

We like to sprinkle steakhouse seasoning on the outside of our burgers, and the salt and spiciness of the seasoning really stood out after being crisped up in the frying oil.

I'm a big fan of grilling, especially in the summer when we're trying to keep our house cool.

My husband fired up a charcoal grill for our little burger experiment, and unsurprisingly, it was the least-messy method. Any drippings or excess fat melted away as it hit the hot charcoal, leaving very little cleanup.

Like the stove-top method, my husband spent about eight minutes grilling the burger, flipping it halfway.

As a true burger fan, my son preferred the grilled patty. He enjoyed the chargrilled, smoky flavors and claimed he could still taste the flames it was cooked over.

I agree that the grilled burger was very good, especially once topped with creamy American cheese. It didn't have the caramelization the stove burger did, but it definitely had flavorful grill marks.

I don't know if there's anything an air fryer can't do. I preheated it to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and cooked the patty for six minutes before flipping it over and letting it cook for two more.

The cleanup was minimal since our air-fryer baskets are dishwasher-safe. All we needed to do was dump out the drippings and load the basket with our dinner dishes.

The downside to using the air fryer was that we served our burgers with fries, which we normally use our air fryer to cook. Instead, we put the frozen fries into the oven while the burgers were cooking and finished them off in the air fryer while the burgers rested for a few minutes.

My husband enjoys grilling, but he found the air-fryer method to produce the most flavorful burger. He likened it to a well-seasoned meatball.

I completely see his point: The burger had no char marks or caramelization, so it was easy to focus only on the flavors of the meat. 

On a weeknight, I'd absolutely make burgers again in my air fryer to keep effort and cleanup minimal. Another bonus is that it doesn't heat up our house as an oven does — something we appreciate in the thick of the Florida summer.

Cooking a burger in the oven produced a tender, fall-apart texture and gave the patty a distinctly meatloaf-like vibe. But I probably wouldn't cook burgers using this method again since the cleanup was so involved. 

The stove burger gave us diner vibes, producing a slightly greasy, caramelized patty that was very flavorful. And the grill produced a wonderfully charred burger that would be perfect for summer cookouts.

But the air fryer just may become my new go-to way to cook burgers. We all enjoyed the way it preserved so many of the flavors, and the cleanup was incredibly simple.

This story was originally published in July 2023 and most recently updated on May 22, 2024. 

Click to check out the other appliances we've put head-to-head so far.